PART 1:  Voyage into Self-Discovery
My name is Scrier and up until six months ago my life was normal, just like anyone else’s.  I was an apprentice in argent, maintaining those flash ships you see down at the docks; you know the ones that only the Navy Commander’s are allowed to sail.

I mean sure, it sounds great but when General William isn’t lassoing with impressionable young ladies he was yelling at me.  
Some life right?  Little did I know my life was about to change forever….

It was a day like any other, way back in the day before the trade market cluttered up the great western city but it would be my last day of freedom.  If I had of known I might have tried spent it doing something better with my time then cleaning barnacles of the bottom of the General’s ship – but then if I did that, I wouldn’t be telling this story and none of this would have happened.


It was the bottom of the harbour, trapped in a bubble if you can imagine that, a strange piece of lavender paper, I noticed it when I was cleaning the underside of the ship and swam down to investigate.  I still remember it clearly, drifting there unnaturally at the bottom of the harbour, like it was calling me.

My father had always told me to fear and respect the sea because she is a fickle mistress, but his words were lost on me that day, the scroll shimmered and my eyes lit up.  It had to be mine; and so I thrust my hand into the sphere and snatched it up, rushing back to the surface I could see the sun glistening through the surface of the water, I had never felt so alive.


After I broke surface and caught my breath I pulled myself up onto the dock and looked down at my treasure, it was like nothing I had ever seen.  Even now it was dry like parched cloth from the arid desert of Shaitan.  I unrolled the scroll as random strangers gathered around me, it was a map… but I couldn’t read it?

It reflected the edges of my perception, like looking into a thousand mirrors all at once and I had to look away.  I couldn’t help but ask myself what something like this would be doing sitting at the bottom of the harbour in Argent City.  Perhaps one of the pirates that used the dock had hidden it or left behind.

It was around that time, just when I was starting to enjoy myself that I heard a familiar tutting.  The old codger had caught me slacking off and no doubt he intended to beat me with some kind of “dispensary tool.”  That’s Navy slang for scary big stick just encase you didn’t know.

So I turn around, always smiling, and stand into a salute, but for reasons unknown the General’s anger melts into ecstatic joy when see’s the map.  In his jovial voice, the one he uses when he is hiring mercenary pirates to get food for the ranks he asked for map.

But that map belonged to me – I’d worked hard for it and I wasn’t going to give it up to this fat womanizing fool, not before I found out what it did.  So I did what any young chore boy would do when faced with 320 pounds of naval muscle, I ran like hell.  It was stupid to believe I could out manoeuvre the navy in Argent but I was able to hide out long enough to hide my map in the rooftop gutters near Alena’s place without anyone noticing me.

I took a heavy trashing that night, but I told them that pirates had stolen it from me when I was running away.  Luckily they believed me and mobilized a recovery team; I still have scars across my back from that beating.  They had to call in Gina to treat me because of the blood loss.

Sounds terrible I know, but then the next day because fortune is cruel, the next day because fait is fickle, I am laying in the recovery room and I over hear a conversation of monumental importance…
To Be Continued.